Kimberly Kline, Ph.D., M.P.H., Nanyang Technological University, has been awarded a 2014 Merck-ICAAC Young Investigator Award for her outstanding accomplishments in Enterococcal infection pathogenesis and treatment. According to her nominator, Michael Gilmore, Harvard Medical School, “Kline is making extremely novel discoveries on polymicrobial communities in infection, and identifying novel targets for new antimicrobial agents.”

Kline earned her B.A. in Biology from St. Olaf College. She received a M.P.H. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2005, where she worked in the laboratory of Hank Seifert. Kline continued her studies as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Scott Hultgren at Washington University, St. Louis and as a visiting postdoc in the laboratory of Birgitta Henriques-Normark and Staffan Normark at the Karolinska Institute. During this time, Kline began studying the pathogenesis of Gram-positive and polymicrobial urinary tract infections and the mechanisms of spatially restricted virulence factor assembly in Gram positive bacteria. As a postdoc, Kline was an American Heart Association Fellow, Carl Tryggers Fellow, and NIH K99 Career Development Award recipient.

In 2011, Kline was awarded the Singapore National Research Foundation Fellowship and joined Nanyang Technological University as an assistant professor. Her laboratory continues to explore the factors that govern focal secretion and processing of cell-wall associated virulence factors in Enterococcus faecalis, and how these sites can be targeted and disrupted by antimicrobial molecules. Her lab extends these studies to understand how Enterococcal surface structures promote interactions with other bacteria and the host during mixed species infections.